Monthly vs. Daily Opt-in for Rewarded Video

One of the charts we always recommend our customers to look at is the comparison between Monthly Opt-In and Daily Opt-In. This chart generated some of the more impactful insights and customers that acted on these insights ended up having nice revenue lift.

What is daily and monthly opt-in for rewarded video

Since rewarded videos are not forced on users there are users who watch them vs. users who don’t. The ratio between the number of users who watch videos and the total number of users who were active in the same time period.

We already discussed opt-in ratio in other posts including this one. This post however concentrates on one important aspect – the ratio can be measured on different time periods. When measured on monthly basis it will be the number of users watching at least one video ad in that month divided by the MAU.

At the same time, we can also look at the daily ratio. In this case we will be looking at the ratio between the number of users watching video ads in a give day and the daily active users, the DAU. In order to get a more reliable result, this ratio needs to be measured across multiple days and then aggregated to a single ratio using weighted average.

Monthly opt-in is always equal or higher than the daily opt-in

When comparing the monthly rate to the averaged daily rate over the month, the monthly opt-in will be at least the same number as the daily rate. To understand this let’s consider a very simple scenario with an app that only has two users. Both users were active in all the days in a given month. In all the even days, the first day user #1 watched a video and in all the odd days user #2 watched a video. Both the DAU and MAU will be 2. When we look at the monthly opt-in both users are watching videos so 2/2 = 100% opt-in. When we look at the daily opt-in however, in each of the days only 1 users watched a video so 1/2 = 50% in each day.

Why should you care about this

When thinking about opportunities to improve revenue, it usually comes down to how much more revenue can be generated compared to the cost of the additional effort. To address these for the opportunity at hand – we will need to make some assumptions. The 1st assumption is that optimizing opt-in rate trnaslates directly into the same proportion of revenue lift. This is something we have noticed pretty much in every app we are monitoring and was also reported by Ketchapp games in this talk. The 2nd assumption is that every users who watched a video in one day in a month and came to play in a 2nd day of that month can be convinced to watch a video again. There are a few reasons for that:

This user already showed that he interested in getting ahead in the game

The user is willing to watch videos

In apps that only allow some users (the ones less likely to pay) to watch video if a user already watched means he is in the right group

If these are true then the potential revenue lift in this opportunity is the precentage difference between the monthly opt-in and the daily opt-in multiplied by the daily revenue.

To put this into an example, an app that makes $200K monthly revenue from rewarded video ads and it’s Monthly opt-in is 50% while the Daily is 40% will be able to make $50K more per month by focusing on this opportunity.

Create a habbit with the right incentives, segmentation and popups

There are a few methods we can use to improve the daily opt-in to the monthly level. The most important step is to track this ratio to see which method creates an impact as we experiment. If you have the right setup for a/b testing this will allow you to get results more quickly.

Method 1 – Incentives and daily bonuses needs to work together

In many cases, users start a game with some coin balance and watching a video might increase that coin balance to a level that allows them to buy something meaningful with the coins. The second time the user comes into the game he will not have that initial coin balance so watching 5 or 10 videos to accumulate enough coins will seem less appealing. Bottom line – to improve daily opt-in, the daily bonuses needs to be designed along side the incentives for videos to amount to something meaningful together.

Method 2 – Simple pop-up for a segmented group

Sometimes, users needs to be reminded. If your platform allows you to pop up an in-game message to a segment of users you can target users who already watched a video in previous sessions with a prompt suggesting they should do so again.

Method 3 – Selling Insurance

People tend to buy insurance every time they fly abroad. However, if the insurance company will allow them to only buy the insurance when they need it, less people will end up buying insurance. Similarly, allowing a user to “save himself” by watching a video is less effective than allowing a user to obtain a “save yourself once” credit in return for watching a video at the beginning of a session.

So in terms of effort estimation, the effort might amount to a few days of studio work to set up such tests, a few hours here and there of testing and analysis. All in all I would be surprised if the efforts on this will exceed $10K in labor costs. This means that the return time will be 1 week for the numbers mentioned above so pretty good investment.

Raised in the Kibbutz and reborn in the city, Yaniv is a certified entre-parent-neur. When he’s not busy doing SEO, content marketing, administration, QA, fund raising, customer support… [stop to breathe], you can find Yaniv snowboarding down the slopes of France and hiking with his kids.
Yaniv holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Management from Tel Aviv University. He is also an avid blogger and a speaker at industry events. Before SOOMLA, Yaniv co-founded EyeView and INTENTClick.

At SOOMLA we aim to give mobile app publishers insights into the revenue they are making from advertising. We specifically help track revenue per user, per segment, per cohort and per traffic source. With the help of this data, we want to help facilitate better monetization and marketing decisions for our clients.